P erkus Tooth, the wall-eyed former rock critic, awoke the morning after the party he vowed would be his last, the night after the worst blizzard of the win- ter, asleep on a staircase, already in the grip of a terrific cluster headache. He suffered these regularly, knew the drill, felt himself hunkering into the blinding, energy-sapping migraine by ancient in- stinct. Nobody greeted him, his hosts asleep themselves, or gone out, so he made his way downstairs, groped to locate his coat in their closet, and then found his way outdoors. Perkus's shoes were, of course, inade- quate for the depth of fresWy fallen snow. He'd have walked the eight blocks home in any event-the migraine nausea would have made a cab ride unbearable-but there wasn't any choice. The streets were free of cabs and any other traffic. Some of the larger, better-managed buildings had had their sidewalks laboriously cleared and salted, the snow pushed into mounds covering hydrants and newspaper boxes, but elsewhere Perkus had to climb through drifts that had barely been tra- versed, fitting his shoes into boot prints that had been punched knee-deep. His pants were quickly soaked, and his sleeves as well, since between semi-blindness and poor footing he stumbled to his hands and knees several times before he even got to Second Avenue. Under other circum- stances he'd have been pitied, perhaps offered aid, or possibly arrested for public drunkenness, but on streets the January blizzard had remade there was no one to observe him, apart from a cross-country skier who stared mercilessly from behind solar goggles, and a few dads here and there dragging kids on sleds. If they no- ticed him at all they probably thought he was out playing, too. There was no reason for someone to be making his way along impassable streets so early the day after. Not a single shop was open, all the en- trances buried in drift. When he met the barricade at the cor- ner of Eighty-fourth, he at first tried to bluster his way past, thinking the cop had misunderstood. But no. His building was w one of three the snowstorm had under- mined, the weight of the snow threaten- g ing the soundness of its foundation. He talked with neighbors he hadn't spoken to o in fifteen years of dwelling on the same a::: 8 floor, though gripped in the vise of his @ cluster headache he barely heard a word they said, and he couldn't have made too good an impression. You need to find some- place to sleep tonight-that was a fragment that got through to him. They might let you in for your stlfff later, but not now. You can call this number. . . but the number he missed. Then, as Perkus teetered away: Get yourse!findoors, young man. And: Pity about that one. Perkus Tooth had already been at a wa- tershed, wishing to find an exit from him- se from his life and his friends, his tatter of a career-to shed it all like a snakeskin. The city in its twenty-first-century incar- nation had no place for him, but it couldn't fire him-he'd quit instead. For so many years he'd lived in his biosphere of an apartment as ifitwere still 1978 outside, as if placing the occasional review in the Vil- lage Voice or New York Rockergave him cre- dentials as a citizen of the city, but the long joke of his existence had reached its punch line. The truth was that he'd never thought of himself as a critic to begin with, more a curator. His apartment-bursting with vinyl LPs, forgotten books, binders full of zines, VHS cassettes of black-and-white films taped from PBS and "Million Dol- lar Movie" -was a cultural cache shored against time's indifference, and Perkus had merely been its caretaker, his sporadic writings the equivalent of a catalogue list- ing items decidedly not for sale. And his friends? Those among whom he wasted his days-the retired actor, now a fixture on the Upper East Side so- cial scene; the former radical turned cyni- cal mayor's operative; the once aspiring investigative journalist turned hack ghost- writer-had all used up their integrity, ac- commodated themselves to the simula- crum that Manhattan had become. Perkus had come to an end with them, too. He needed a new life. Now, incredibly, the storm had called his bluff This was thrill- ing and terrifYing at once: who would he be without his apartment, without that assembly of brunching mediocrities? There was only one haven. Perkus had one friend who was unlike the others: Biller. (Perkus had never heard a last name. Biller was just Biller.) Homeless in a Manhattan that no longer coddled the homeless, Biller was crafty, a squatter and a survivor, an underground man. Now, as ifin a merciful desert vision, the informa- tion that Biller had once jotted on a scrap of receipt on Perkus's kitchen table ap- peared before him: Biller's latest digs, in the F riendreth Apartments, on Sixty-fifth near York. Perkus couldn't remember the numerical address, but he didn't need that; from Biller's descriptions of the odd building and its inhabitants he'd surely be able to find it. Yes, Biller was the one he needed now. Trudging sickened through the snowdrifts like a Napoleonic soldier in retreat from Moscow, Perkus was adequately con- vinced. He had got complacent in his Eighty-fourth Street apartment. Time to go off the grid. Biller knew how to do this, even in a place like Manhattan, which was nothing but grid. Biller was the essential man. They could compare notes and pool resources, Perkus preferring to think of himself as not yet completely without re- sources. Perkus laughed at himself now: in his thinking, Biller was becoming like Old Sneelock, in Dr. Seuss's "If I Ran the Cir- cus," the one who d single-handedly raise the tents, sell the pink lemonade, shovel the elephants' shit, and also do the high- wire aerialist act. In this manner, dismal yet self-amused, Perkus propelled his body to Sixty-fifth Street, despite the headache's dislodging him from himself, working with the only body he had-a shivering, frost-fingered, half-blind stumbler in sweat- and salt-stained party clothes. He trailed a dog and its walker into the lobby, catching the swinging door before it clicked shut, one last act of mastery of the mechanics of outward existence, and then passed out in a melting pool on the tile just inside. Biller would later explain to Perkus that another dog walker had sought Biller out, knowing that the tall black man in the spotted fur hat func- tioned as ambassador for the vagabond entities sometimes seen lurking in the building, and that this tatterdemalion in the entranceway was nothing if not one of those. Biller gathered Perkus up and installed him in what he would come to know as Avàs apartment. It was there that Perkus, nursed through the first hours by Biller's methodical and unques- tioning attentions, his clothes changed, his brow mopped, his sapped body nour- ished with a simple cup of ramen and beef broth, felt his new life begin. Perkus Tooth had twenty-four hours alone in the apartment before Ava arrived. Biller kept close tabs on all the vacancies in the building and assured him that this was the best way, the intended result being that Ava would take him for granted, detect his THE NEW YORKER, MAY 25, 2009 65